NORTH KOREA:CREATING A TOP-CLASS research university anywhere is a formidable challenge. When the host is North Korea, arguably the world's most closed society, the problems multiply. But how about building it on land leased from the North's army with funding from Christian evangelicals, and filling it with foreign academics?
If that sounds like mission impossible, the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (Pust) has already been built and has started enrolling about 300 handpicked students. North Korea’s first foreign-funded and truly international college is expected to train a new generation of business executives, innovators and technicians and help the insular Stalinist backwater take a giant leap out of the intellectual cold – or so says its supporters.
“Many people said we would never get here, but we have proved them wrong,” says the university’s founding president James Kim. One of several Korean-Americans involved in the project, Kim says the college proves that Pyongyang wants to trade, invest and research with the West. They were the ones who asked us to build the university. It’s very exciting.”
As even he admits, however, the best-laid plans in North Korea go awry. The classrooms at Pust have been sitting empty for over a year, thanks mainly to rising tensions between Pyongyang and the outside world. The private university’s elite students wait for the green light from the North’s government. Its 48 professors, including two British citizens and at least a dozen other Europeans and Americans kick their heels while they wait for visas to be issued. Will it ever actually teach anything?
“Yes, I’m 1,000 per cent sure that we will open for classes in September,” insists Kim. “We have had some political problems lately that have held us up but that is the nature of this project.”
That may be an understatement. Last month’s sinking of a South Korean frigate, killing 46 sailors in what many believe was a Northern torpedo attack, has sent relations on the peninsula plunging back into deep freeze. The South’s president Lee Myung-bak who has dumped the decade-old “sunshine” policy of rapprochement with Pyongyang in favour of a tougher line, recently chaired a meeting of his top military commanders to craft a response – the first such meeting in the country’s history. A third of the new university’s professors are South Korean nationals who are reportedly nervous about their prospects – and their safety – behind the bamboo curtain.
Still, most of those involved in the project believe the tensions will subside because neither side can afford to go to war. And Pyongyang is increasingly desperate to follow its booming neighbour China out of the economic and intellectual wilderness, says Chan Mo Park, one of Pust’s most prominent backers and president of the Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea. “The [North Korean] government sees that the country is stagnating, and it wants the world to know that the capacity of its people and scientists is very high.”
Kim agrees: “They have many experts in information technology and engineering. After all, they were able to make a nuclear bomb,” he quips.
Many North Korea watchers consider its standards of computer science, software and applied mathematics world class, although it has just a handful of good higher education institutions, among them Kim Il Sung University and the Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies. They say its young people are bursting with pent-up entrepreneurial energy.
Pust is expected to generate spin-off businesses and even a Silicon Valley-style business park – reportedly one of the dreams of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who gave the project his backing. Its founders hope that it will nurture a generation of entrepreneurs and scientists that will help lead the country’s drive to prosperity. One of the key questions hanging over Pust, however, is intellectual freedom – the key prerequisite for any good research facility, particularly one that will focus on postgraduate studies. Kim claims it is already internet wired and will be the first institution on North Korean soil to allow free unrestricted access. Others expect some sort of state control, probably along the lines of China, which routinely censors internet content.
Built on a 100-hectare plot leased by the People’s Army, Pust is funded by a network of mainly Korean Christians in the South and the US, who have raised over $35 million. Many of the same people were behind China’s first foreign-funded college, Yanbian University of Science and Technology, a trilingual (Chinese-Korean-English) institution close to the North Korean border. They are hoping to replicate its success on the other side of the Yalu River.
